Register of the Kentucky Historical Society最新文献

{"title":"The Princess of Albemarle: Amélie Rives, Author and Celebrity at the Fin de Siècle by Jane Turner Censer (review)","authors":"Minoa D. Uffelman","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a913075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a913075","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"86 1","pages":"285 - 287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139371982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bootstrap Liberalism: Texas Political Culture in the Age of FDR by Sean P. Cunningham (review)","authors":"Boris Heersink","doi":"10.1353/soh.2023.a903228","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2023.a903228","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"120 1","pages":"205 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47856453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era by Robert Emmett Curran (review)","authors":"Gracjan Kraszewski","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a907776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a907776","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era by Robert Emmett Curran Gracjan Kraszewski (bio) American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era. By Robert Emmett Curran. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. 472. $60.00 cloth) Robert Emmett Curran’s American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era is great read for two reasons. It is a reminder—necessary in a profession lately (but maybe always) [End Page 187] overloaded with jargon, thematic inventiveness at the expense of clarity, and an insatiable thirst for ‘saying something new’—that the historian’s first job, nay, duty, is to find facts, list facts, analyze facts. Based on an impressive research base, with diocesan archives in New York and New Orleans, Savannah, Richmond, and Jackson, Mississippi, but a sliver of the whole, Curran has given us an old school, chronological account of a time in American history; full stop. More of these types of works are needed. Secondly, he explains a historio-graphical hole and then sets to filling it. Far too often, curious though it may be, a historian will explain that X is missing in the field of _____ but, a few hundred pages later, X has hardly been addressed. Curran argues the missing X in the field of American Catholic history is comprehensiveness and content. There are still ample shadow spots, unchartered territory, in America’s ‘Catholic story’ and little connective work trying to tie together larger chronological investigations. And so, “this book . . . provides a comprehensive history of the impact the developments from the Mexican-American War to the end of Reconstruction had upon the entire Catholic community, including Blacks and Indigenous Americans” (p. 6). A fair summary and he does throughout and well. And the telos towards which this study progresses is in the title, the noble, if evanescent, “quest for equality.” Catholics in nineteenth-century America, he concludes at book’s end, failed to attain this goal. The culprit is a tribalism that from time immemorial restricts the growth of any group unwilling to sacrifice particular prerogatives for general, if not universal, goods. “Catholics, as a community, have known, for generations, the consequences of being treated inequitably. But when the moment came to be part of a revolution to right the historic imbalance for everyone, most white Catholics could not rise above their tribal interests to treat equality as something more than a zero-sum commodity” (p. 380). Curran’s book is well worth a read, especially by students of Catholic, American, or religious history, for two reasons: it is a solid, fact and chronology-driven narrative and it fills much of the historiographical holes the author identifies at the outset. I will not belabor [End Page 188] the second point but it is worth commenting on the sheer breadth of topics Curran covers. Beginning with the Mexican-American War, he proceeds to treat","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"107 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Woman: The American History of an Idea by Lillian Faderman (review)","authors":"Joan M. Johnson","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a907775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a907775","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Woman: The American History of an Idea by Lillian Faderman Joan M. Johnson (bio) Woman: The American History of an Idea. By Lillian Faderman. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. Pp. 600. $32.50 cloth; $25.00 paper) Lillian Faderman’s Woman: The American History of an Idea, takes readers on a fast-paced journey in women’s and gender history from seventeenth-century America through the early twenty-first century. Faderman explains that her approach is to investigate idealized womanhood throughout American history, examine who created those ideals and why, and consider how individual people have been able to contest, revise, or ignore the boundaries of idealized womanhood. Faderman explores the ideas articulated in the written word—sermons, editorials, letters, etc.—as well as the lived experiences of hundreds of women. Though Faderman sought to write a history of an idea, the book is brimming with the stories of individual women, most of whom will be familiar to historians, though likely not the general public. Faderman begins in the Massachusetts Bay colony with a well-known cast of characters: John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Anne [End Page 185] Bradstreet, and Anne Hutchinson. White male religious leaders idealized female obedience. Women were not to preach or to disobey male authority, with Hutchinson famously being scolded, “You have stept out of your place. You have rather been a Husband than a Wife and a Preacher than a Hearer, and a Magistrate than a Subject” (p. 16). From here, Faderman moves quickly through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reaches the Civil War by chapter five, lingers thematically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century for several chapters, and then moves decade by decade through the twentieth century, with a final chapter on the twenty-first century. She covers the women and events now found in most American women’s history textbooks, from Lucy Larcom, the Lowell textile mill worker, to Frances Harper, the author, temperance activist, abolitionist, and suffragist, to Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, the New York suffragist who had immigrated from China with her parents. Central to Woman are the tensions over the ideal woman’s temperament, activities, and sexuality. Faderman shows how many men, and some women, idealized meek, submissive, pleasing women, who cheerfully obeyed their husbands and fathers. Further, they strove to draw boundaries around women’s activities, limiting her to domestic duties, rather than employment outside the home or political roles. Finally, they sought to keep women’s sexuality within heterosexual marriage, maintaining that women were naturally passionless unless awakened by men’s natural sexual impulse. These ideals worked together to elevate male political, economic, and social power. Faderman shows how women contested the bounds of womanhood over and over, risking imprisonment at times, and reveals the backlash that followed each time women pushed the boundaries of w","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"197 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Clayton J. Butler (review)","authors":"Charles R. Welsko","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a907777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a907777","url":null,"abstract":"189 the second point but it is worth commenting on the sheer breadth of topics Curran covers. Beginning with the Mexican-American War, he proceeds to treat nativism in the 1850s, the election of 1860, Irish in Confederate service, questions of neutrality especially acute in Kentucky, Catholic bishops debating the war, loyalty oaths to the Union, the campaigns of 1862, 1863, and 1864, slavery and its central role in the conflict, Catholics and Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, which, sadly, had distinct Catholic undertones in persons such as Mary Surratt, the first woman executed by the U.S. government. And if this were already not enough, because it is, we do need more works of this intention, this approach. Curran’s book fits into relevant historiography seamlessly. As a Catholic meta-history it best compares to Jay P. Dolan’s In Search of American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension and John McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom: A History while on the strictly nineteenth-century American front, scholars will notice a close, and worthy, similarity to Orville Vernon Burton’s The Age of Lincoln: A History.","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“We help our clients get and keep basic needs”: The Appalachian Research and Defense Fund and Legal Services in Eastern Kentucky","authors":"Jessica Wilkerson","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a907772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a907772","url":null,"abstract":"“We help our clients get and keep basic needs”: The Appalachian Research and Defense Fund and Legal Services in Eastern Kentucky Jessica Wilkerson (bio) On November 14, 1975, residents of Poor Bottom hollow in Pike County, Kentucky, thanked John Rosenberg, director of Appalachian Research and Defense Fund (AppalReD), for his work helping to revoke a strip mine permit in their community.1 According to news reports, the state had never reversed a permit. Issued earlier in the year, the permit would have allowed the Hurricane Elkhorn Coal Company to strip sixty-nine acres of two coal seams on slopes above the narrow valley where 335 residents lived along the Poor Bottom Fork of Marrowbone Creek. The residents argued that the permit did not follow Kentucky statute, which stated that a permit could not be issued if there was probable cause to believe that the operation would be a hazard to dwelling houses or public roads. There had already been one incident: a boulder crashed down from the mining site, where the company began operations, barely missing a resident’s home. Rosenberg brought in an expert who showed that strip mining the ridges above Poor Bottom posed a serious flooding threat. Residents feared the worst—that a mining operation on a ridge above their homes could release water from the inactive deep mines, with [End Page 141] water and mine waste pouring down the mountain and into their homes.2 Edith and Jake Easterling were leaders among the residents and had organized a petition against the strip-mining operation that garnered ninety-five signatures in the community. Both had been involved in the federal War on Poverty’s community action agencies for the last decade, and Jake was a lifelong member of the United Mine Workers of America. Several years before, Edith had been embroiled in the struggle to prevent strip mining on Pike County resident Jink Ray’s farm, inspiring a local environmental justice movement. Her activism drew the wrath of local coal operators and their allies in the state legislature, who stoked a red-baiting campaign against Edith and other activists.3 Edith described the community’s victory in Poor Bottom as part of a longer struggle to wrest power from corporate landowners: “If people get together they can fight the money people. It’s the only way we’re going to get rid of strip mining.”4 People organizing against corporate abuse is a significant, and often inspiring, part of the story of the Appalachian War on Poverty and the community organizing that grew from it in the 1970s. Also important, but downplayed in the scholarship, is how supporting players—especially public interest lawyers—provided vital services to community groups during and after the Appalachian War on Poverty.5 [End Page 142] This article examines the history of legal services in Appalachia to show how the gains of the antipoverty movements of the 1960s and 1970s were institutionalized, as well as how legal aid attorneys in organizations such as ","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A New History of the American South ed. by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (review)","authors":"Matthew Hild","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a907773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a907773","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: A New History of the American South ed. by W. Fitzhugh Brundage Matthew Hild (bio) A New History of the American South. Edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 616. $45.00 cloth) A New History of the American South, according to editor W. Fitzhugh Brundage, is the “first, collaborative effort to tell the history of the American South for the twenty-first century” (p. ix). The qualifier “collaborative” is crucial here; William A. Link’s Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region (2015) is a noteworthy example of a single-author effort to tell that story. Edited volumes in Kent State University Press’s “Interpreting American History” series cover, to date, slavery, Reconstruction, and the New South, but not the history of the American South as comprehensively as this book does. Nevertheless, Brundage clearly states that the book is not intended to be an encyclopedic, comprehensive history of the region. Instead, the book examines certain themes, such as “repeated disruptive change in the history of the South,” “ongoing ethnic coexistence and exploitation,” and southern distinctiveness and identity, topics that Brundage has written about in his own work (pp. x, xiv). Part one of the book, which is divided into three parts, is titled “Precontact to the American Revolution.” In some ways, this section of the book does come off as being about as comprehensive as one could expect from a tome that is so ambitious in its scope. Coverage begins with the Paleoindian Period (14,000 B.C.E. –9,000 B.C.E.) and extends through the Revolutionary War Era. Agriculture, construction, politics, wars, religion, and the “ethnic coexistence and exploitation” that the introduction refers to all receive considerable coverage (p. xiv). Slavery draws much attention in part one and part two, “The Long Nineteenth Century,” which begins with Laura F. Edwards’ [End Page 181] “The South and the New Nation, 1783–1820” and ends with Scott Reynolds Nelson’s “The Bourbon South.” Edwards points to the southern founders, especially Thomas Jefferson, as helping lay the key groundwork for a selective, mythical version of the region’s history, “making the world [they] described . . . seem real, even when it had little to do with the actual past” (p. 168). Martha S. Jones emphasizes the role of Blacks in “The Age of Emancipation” (the title of chapter six). Kate Masur examines the mid-nineteenth-century path to the Civil War, and Gregory P. Downs examines the rise and fall of the Confederacy and Reconstruction. Nelson’s essay analyzes the “Bourbon” era that followed Reconstruction, with particular emphasis upon the career and writings of Atlanta’s prophet of the “New South creed,” Henry W. Grady. Part three, “The Twentieth Century,” is the longest of the three, with six essays. Collectively, they cover the rise and fall of Jim Crow, the contradictions of southern reform in the Progressive Era (and one of its most pr","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Re-made Our Economy and the Planet by Bart Elmore (review)","authors":"Andrew C. Baker","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a907780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a907780","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Re-made Our Economy and the Planet by Bart Elmore Andrew C. Baker (bio) Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Re-made Our Economy and the Planet. By Bart Elmore. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 248. $28.00 cloth; $21.99 ebook) Bart Elmore has once again written a crisp and compelling environmental business history. In Country Capitalism he brings together stories of how five of the world’s biggest companies built out the infrastructure of twenty-first century consumer capitalism. Coca-Cola delivered ice-cold satisfaction “within arm’s reach” of Americans at every crossroads hamlet and rural gas station (p. 8). Delta Airlines pioneered the hub and spoke system that connected regional cities to national markets. Walmart’s trucking network and inventory tracking system distributed goods to small-town stores. FedEx used these systems to deliver packages overnight across the country. Bank of America, in turn, streamlined the credit that paid for the purchases that kept the diesel engines rumbling and the jet engines spinning. [End Page 196] Each company played a role in creating the system that lets me expect two-day shipping on the latest object of desire. These stories build on the argument Elmore made in Citizen Coke (2016), that consumer businesses were most profitable when they consciously avoided getting bogged down in resource extraction or production. These companies transformed themselves into “conduits of capitalism” (p. 5). They mastered logistics, leveraged federal infrastructure projects, navigated shifting regulations, and secured government contracts. Their profitability came from greasing the wheels of consumer capitalism; it came from conquering time and space. This conquest came at a high environmental cost. For each chapter on a business’s innovative early years, Elmore includes a second examining how a more mature business in later decades navigated the environmental debts that came with these innovations. Coke’s vending machines forced it to confront the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) crisis. Delta’s fleet of inefficient planes made it particularly sensitive to the oil crises of the 1970s. Walmart’s sprawling supercenters clashed with slow-growth and NIMBY activism in the 1990s. FedEx faced pressure for enabling exploitative production chains in Asian markets. Bank of America’s portfolio connected it with “dirty” industries like coal and oil. By the late twentieth century, these companies were having to reckon with the ways that they had “remade our economy and the planet.” In Country Capitalism Elmore makes a regional argument. His five stories argue that “the rural roads that led to our have-it-now, fly-by-night, buy-on-credit economy ran through the American South” (p. 7). In this argument his “country capitalism” builds on Bethany Moreton’s “Walmart Country” and Shane Hamilton’s “Trucking Country,” finding e","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"475 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (review)","authors":"David A. Nichols","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a907774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a907774","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk David A. Nichols (bio) The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. By Ned Blackhawk. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. 616. $35.00 cloth) After armed insurgents stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, historian Jill Lepore told National Public Radio that “We are off the grid of the trajectory of American history.” Students of Native American history found Lepore’s remark puzzling. European-Americans built the United States, after all, with stolen labor on stolen land, and white settlers did sometimes direct the violence underlying those thefts against their governments (e.g. Bacon’s Rebellion, the Paxton riots, the Civil War). Ned Blackhawk, who begins his magisterial new history of Native North America with a critique of Lepore’s work (specifically her 2018 book These Truths), would prefer that his readers find in the insurrection of January 6th the shock of the familiar. From an Indigenous perspective the arc of American history bends not toward justice but toward violence. The title of Blackhawk’s first book, Violence over the Land (2006), could also summarize The Rediscovery of America’s account of early American history. Eastern Algonquians experienced subjugation and enslavement at the hands of Virginians and Puritans. In the eighteenth century violence toward Native peoples unified white settlers and mobilized them politically. The Revolution, Blackhawk argues, actually began with the outbreak of settler violence in 1760s Pennsylvania. The framers of the American Constitution abhorred frontier chaos, but their new nation-state planned to build its wealth from Native lands, and social order took a back seat to that imperative. A policy [End Page 183] based on treaties gave way to one of coercion, outsourced to aggressive state governments, and finally to one of ethnic cleansing, perpetrated by settler militias. After the Civil War, the national government enacted its “Peace Policy,” replacing the overt violence of the Plains Wars with the institutional violence of the reservation. The Interior Department used hunger and parental incarceration to force Indigenous children into boarding schools, where teachers stripped them of their language and identity. The Dawes Act (1887) broke up communally held lands into allotments, clearing the way for another round of land sales. The efficiency with which the U.S. government dispossessed and subju-gated Native Americans impressed its future adversaries, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Even after fighting an apocalyptic war with those admirers, the United States gave Native peoples no relief. In the 1950s Congress and the BIA “terminated” the sovereignty of one hundred Indigenous nations, and until 1978, state welfare agencies offset the cost of aiding impoverished Native communities by seizing children, over 25 percent of all Indigenous c","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"197 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880 by Evan C. Rothera (review)","authors":"Samantha Payne","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a907778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a907778","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880 by Evan C. Rothera Samantha Payne (bio) Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880. By Evan C. Rothera. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. 344. $50.00 cloth) In Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas, Evan C. Rothera uses transnational and comparative methods to bring the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), the latter part of the Argentine War of Unification (1861–1876), and the Mexican war against the French (1861–1867) into a single historical frame. Rothera argues that all three wars should be understood as part of a “hemispheric and worldwide” struggle between republican and conservative forces across the nineteenth century (p. 4). More specifically, these three conflicts gave rise to a new moment of “Pan-American cooperation” during the 1860s, as people from across the hemisphere began collaborating to strengthen republican political movements (pp. 8–9). Although in each case the republicans triumphed on the battlefield, Rothera argues that their movements fared poorly during the national “reconstructions” that followed (p. 14). He demonstrates that in all three cases, conservative elites successfully deployed violence and terror to win major political concessions from their adversaries. As a result, the initially “boundless” appetite for hemispheric cooperation began to wane. By the 1880s, state officials in all three nations had begun to prioritize “order and stability” at home over the expansion of democracy abroad (pp. 215–216). The book is divided into two parts. Part one uses a transnational methodology to trace “connections and cooperation” between the U.S., Mexico, and Argentina during the 1860s. Chapter one examines the paper-trail left by a group of “transnational warriors” who fought to defend republicanism in both the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican war against the French (p. 27). Chapter two highlights how Mexican state officials invoked the Monroe Doctrine to try to secure U.S. intervention on their behalf against the French occupation (p. 52). Although the U.S. did not formally enter the conflict, Rothera insists that U.S. assistance “proved critical” to the war effort and inaugurated a “strong [End Page 192] and vibrant . . . rapprochement” between the two nations (pp. 75, 95). Chapter three argues that Mexicans and Argentines continued to promote “friendship and cooperation” with the United States by celebrating the Fourth of July during the 1860s and 1870s (p. 98). Finally, chapter four explores how the Argentine government recruited North American schoolteachers to help promote universal education during the 1870s. Part two switches from a transnational to a comparative methodology to examine the national “reconstructions” that followed these wars. Chapter five contends that conservatives throughout the hemisphere employed paramilitar","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"886 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}